Planning for calamity

I CONFESS to having impure thoughts. They’ve been going on a long time, on three continents and in practically every city I’ve ever lived in. They started when I was quite young, when I realized that everyone should have an escape vehicle in times of calamity.

Calamities, I knew even then, are rare, but it’s a wise man who recognizes that they can occur and who makes timely provision for his family to flee for their lives. I’m thinking of things like our resident volcano erupting, or the biker gangs going to war with each other in our town, or Sarah Palin being elected president.

My way of escaping is, of course, by sea, and to this end I have always turned my impure thoughts into deeds by choosing a suitable boat berthed in my nearest marina or mooring field. I recommend that each of you who lacks a boat suitable for crossing an ocean should follow suit and generate some impure thoughts of your own.

Let’s get one thing straight immediately. You’re not going to steal this boat when panic sets in. You’re merely going to borrow it to sail to New Zealand, or Tahiti, or wherever it’s nice and safe and peaceful. And when things have settled down, you’ll see that it gets returned to its owner. Honest.

Meanwhile, as you stroll the marina docks, pick out your boat and find out surreptitiously as much as you can about it. What kind of boat is it? Do some research on the internet. How many berths? Does she have a good sail wardrobe? Does the owner keep food and water on board? Does he lock the boat, and if so, what size bolt cutters do you need to buy?

Find out how to start the engine and how to raise the sails. You can do a lot of this by lurking at a distance and making notes but if you can bring yourself to be really impure, you could make friends with the owner and get invited on board. It would mean betraying a friendship when the time comes to borrow the boat, and ordinarily I would never encourage such a thing, but when it comes to survival — and survival is what we’re talking about here — then it’s every man for himself, as Nature intended.

From time to time, you might want to change your planned escape vehicle. Better boats come along now and then, or easier boats to spy on. I am tempted to tell you which boat I have my eye on presently, but it wouldn’t be wise. All I can say is that it’s always known in the family as Plan B. It’s not clever to tell anyone else about it, lest they should take advantage of you and beat you to it when the time comes. Let them do their own homework, I say. Let them have their own impure thoughts, and learn to live with them, as I have to.

Today’s Thought

“The unfit die—the fit both live and thrive.”

Alas, who say so? They who do survive.

— Sarah N. Cleghorn, The Survival of the Fittest

Tailpiece

“Are you Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always drink your vodka neat?”

“No, sometimes my shirt tail hangs out.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

What to do when chaos reigns

PRESIDENT OBAMA says there can be no doubt that global warming is taking place right now, under our very noses. I, for one, am not surprised. Since the Earth was formed, it has undergone many climate changes. Ice ages come and ice ages go. I’d agree that we seem to be in a slow warming phase at the moment, though I’m agnostic on the question of how much of it is due to the natural changes that have kept happening repeatedly over the eons, and how much is due to present-day man-made pollution. After all, many climate changes took place way back in time, before there were enough meddling human beings to make any difference.

Anyway, the fact that the seas are rising, and causing a Native American  tribe here in Washington state to figure out a way to move their town to higher land, has me thinking about Plan B again.

Plan B comes in useful in times of man-made or natural catastrophe, caused by politics, financial crises, weather, or whatever. Plan B goes back a long way with me. Plan B goes back to a time when I was living in a South Africa dominated by apartheid, a time when many South Africans expected an uprising, a bloody revolution.

Plan B was always to steal a boat.

We had a boat, of course, a nice little C&C 28, a Trapper-class fin keeler, fast and pretty. But we wanted something a little bigger and more seaworthy, something that could take us around the Cape of Storms and across the Atlantic to America, my wife’s country.
So whenever we sat on the veranda of the Point Yacht Club in Durban with our sundowners, our eyes would scan the serried ranks of sailboats gleaming before us in the sub-tropical sun.
We were very picky. We had to be able to handle her ourselves, just June and me and our 17-year-old son, Kevin. We’d prefer a ketch, for easy sail handling, but a sloop or cutter would be OK, too. We particularly wanted a boat with wind-vane self-steering. Something between 30 and 35 feet. Four berths. A full keel. Fiberglass or steel or aluminum, no wooden hulls, thank you. Been there, done that. Oh, and a engine that was easy to start, because we probably wouldn’t have the engine key. Definitely wouldn’t have the key.
There were usually two or three contenders, and our current choice would change from time to time as new intelligence came in. Kevin was our main source. “They hide the cabin key in a flap of the dodger,” he’d announce after a sail through the ranks in his dinghy. “They have an Aries vane and a 10-foot Avon dinghy with a Yamaha outboard.” We promised him the best berth in exchange for his information.
Come the revolution, when the streets were dripping with blood, and there was shooting and stabbing and buildings ablaze and all that sort of thing, we would rendezvous at Plan B and make our escape, unnoticed in all the carnage.
OK, nobody’s expecting a revolution in America right now, but global warming is a looming threat to our very existence. President Obama  said so. Which begs the question: Where will you flee to when the time comes? What nice, cool, clean, peaceful, country have you picked out?

New Zealand, maybe? The Falkland Islands? Patagonia? Wales, god help you? And how are you going to get there? The airplanes will all be filled with people with much more money and influence than you, remember.  And there won’t be much time to prepare when the crunch comes, and everything goes down the tubes with a big, sudden swoosh.

Maybe it’s time you, too, started working on Plan B.

Today’s Thought

Chaos is a friend of mine.

— Bob Dylan, Newsweek, 9 Dec 85

Tailpiece

“Why’s Lulu so gloomy?”

“She got married three days ago.”

“Why is that making her gloomy?”

“Well, she gave all her life savings to her new husband.”

“And where is he now?”

“Dunno. She’s still waiting for him to come back from his honeymoon.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for a new Mainly about Boats column.)